Sheila Mccarthy

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It may be style over substance, but Brandon Cronenberg cleverly blends his father David's love of medical yuckiness with an elusive Lynchian-style mystery to keep us unnerved all the way through this low-key thriller. And the film also works as a dark satire on today's celebrity-obsessive culture, in which fans will go to any lengths to be closer to their idols. So imagine if they had the chance to share a star's illness.

This is the work done by the gleaming, futuristic Lucas Clinic, where clinician Syd (Jones) works. He injects one patient (Smith) with an STD taken from mega-star Hanna Geist (Gadon). But Syd has secretly given himself a more powerful virus, which he learns is killing Hannah. Now everyone wants to get their hands on him, even as he realises that he needs to find a cure before it's too late. So he gets in touch with Hannah's assistant (McCarthy) and doctor (McDowell), and discovers that there's a conspiracy afoot involving his clinic's main rival.

The idea that fans would go to this kind of extreme isn't actually that unbelievable in a culture in which we watch their every move on reality TV and feel like their friends through Twitter. And Cronenberg's idea goes beyond sharing viruses, including cloned skin grafts and even a butcher (Pingue) who sells meat grown from celebrity cells. While the ideas echo some of David Cronenberg's films (mainly Videodrome and eXistenZ), this is also a strikingly original approach. The imagery looks amazing, with all-white surfaces and a spare use of colour, against which Syd's unravelling physicality looks increasingly garish.

Lock the doors and bolt the windows, because they're coming--thousands of big, smelly rats, scampering underneath New York City, sticking their long, slippery noses above the sewers! With a premise involving critters overrunning a major metropolitan area, The Rats has potential. After all, the concept undeniably sparks interest; if rats helped spread a deadly plague through Europe during the 14th century, think of the possible bacterial chaos they could erupt in modern-day Manhattan.

The Rats, however, aims for a much lower target. Instead of disease and contamination possibilities, the movie involves a violent colony of genetically altered rodents overrunning a Manhattan department store on a rampage to terrorize the entire city. Why would a colony of rats want to seize the population of New York? The movie does not have this answer, so it continually features scenes of the rats scurrying through pipes, sewers, subways, stores, and just about every else. Occasionally, an innocent bystander gets in their way, and they quickly become rodent food.